The father of a Chechen man killed by an FBI agent as he was questioned over
links to the Boston marathon bombing has claimed his son was shot in the
back of the head in an extra-judicial execution.

Abdulbaki Todashev said his eldest son Ibragim was hit with seven bullets – six to his body and a “control shot” fired into his head, designed to finish him off.

Mr Todashev, 27, was killed at his home in Orlando, Florida, on May 22 as an FBI special agent and several other law enforcement personnel questioned him about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the alleged Boston bomber who died in a shoot-out with police after the attack.

The FBI has said that Mr Todashev, who moved to the US from Russia in 2008, was shot when he initiated a “violent confrontation” with his questioners.

Mr Todashev was said to have confessed to his involvement in an unsolved 2011 triple murder with Tsarnaev when he became violent, according to agents.

His father disputed that view at a Moscow press conference as he showed a series of photographs that he said were his son’s bullet-riddled corpse, and called for the officers responsible for the death to be prosecuted.

“After this case, I’ve formed the impression that they come brazenly to your home like bandits and kill a person,” he said.

One of the graphic photographs – taken in a morgue in Florida by one of Ibragim Todashev’s friends and emailed to his father – appears to show a bullet wound to the top left side of the young man’s head.

Abdulbaki Todashev said his son was questioned for eight hours in a session that was not recorded on video, and without a lawyer or witness present. “I can’t believe that five armed officers couldn’t restrain an unarmed man, or if not, wound him at the very most rather than killing him,” he said.

He added, without giving details: “I think my son knew something. He was removed in order to silence him.”

In Florida, the dead man’s widow made a tearful appeal for a US federal civil rights investigation into his death. Reni Manukyan, his wife of nearly three years, said Ibragim Todashev knew Tsarnaev, but that they were not close, and her husband had nothing to do with the triple murder.

There have been conflicting accounts from anonymous law enforcement sources to US media outlets about how Ibragim Todashev was killed.

It was originally reported that Ibragim Todashev threatened an agent with a knife, but the FBI later backed away from that account. In another version, he flipped over a table, knocking the FBI agent’s head against a wall, then lunged at him with a ceremonial sword. Fearing for his life, the agent was said to have opened fire.

In the latest twist, two sources quoted in the Washington Post said that Ibragim Todashev was unarmed when he was shot, although one said that he had lunged for an FBI agent.

The FBI did not comment on the latest reports, but said that the shooting was the subject of a detailed review.